Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Guest Column By William Blum -- Anti-Empire Report

Official website of the author, historian, and U.S.
foreign policy critic.

The Anti-Empire Report #140

By William Blum – Published November 3rd, 2015

Are you confused by the Middle East? Here are some
things you should know. (But you’ll probably still be confused.)

The
US, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the Gulf monarchies have all
in the recent past supported al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State (ISIS) with
arms, money, and/or manpower.

The
first example of this was in 1979 when the United States began covert
operations in Afghanistan, six months before the Russians arrived,
promoting Islamic fundamentalism across the southern tier of the Soviet
Union against “godless communism”. All the
al-Qaeda/Taliban shit then followed.

In
addition to Afghanistan, the United States has provided support to Islamic
militants in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, the Caucasus, and Syria.

The
United States overthrew the secular governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya and is trying to do the same with Syria, thus giving great impetus
to the rise of ISIS. Said Barack Obama in March of this year: “ISIS is a
direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion. Which
is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally
aim before we shoot.”

More
than a million refugees from these wars of Washington are currently
over-running Europe and North Africa. God
Bless American exceptionalism.

The
Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish Kurds have all fought against ISIS, but Turkey –
close US ally and member of NATO – has fought against each of them.

Russia,
Iran, Iraq, and Lebanese factions have each supported the Syrian
government in various ways in Damascus’s struggle against ISIS and other
terrorist groups, including the (much celebrated but seldom seen) “moderate”
ones. For this all four countries have been sharply criticized by
Washington.

The
United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, but has used the same occasions to
damage Syria’s infrastructure and oil-producing capacity.

Russia
has bombed ISIS in Syria, but has used the same occasions to attack
Syria’s other enemies.

The
mainstream media almost never mentions the proposed Qatar natural-gas
pipelines – whose path to Europe Syria has stood in the way of for years –
as a reason for much of the hostility toward Syria. The pipelines could
dethrone Russia as Europe’s dominant source of energy.

In
Libya, during the beginning of the 2011 civil war, anti-Gaddafi rebels,
many of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO in
“no-fly zones”.

US
policy in Syria in the years leading up to the 2011 uprising against
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, which began the whole current mess, was
designed to promote sectarianism, which in turn led to civil war with the
goal of regime change.

US
Secretary of State John Kerry declared on October 22 that in resolving
Syria’s civil war the country “should not be broken up, that it must
remain secular, and that Syrians should choose their future leader.” (All
of which actually describes Syria under Assad.) Then Kerry said: “One
thing stands in the way of being able to rapidly move to implement that,
and it’s a person called Assad, Bashar Assad.”

Why does the government of the United States hate
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad with such passion?

Is it because, as we’re told, he’s a brutal dictator?
But how can that be the reason for the hatred? It would be difficult indeed to
name a brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century or of the
21st century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported,
but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the
population; at present the list would include Saudi Arabia, Honduras,
Indonesia, Egypt, Colombia, Qatar, and Israel.

The United States, I suggest, is hostile to the Syrian
government for the same reason it has been hostile to Cuba for more than half a
century; and hostile to Venezuela for the past 15 years; and earlier to
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; and to Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Chile; and
so on continuing through the world atlas and history books.

What these governments have had in common can be
summarized in a single word – independence … independence from American foreign
policy; the refusal to be a client state of Washington; the refusal to be
continuously hostile to Washington’s Officially Designated Enemies;
insufficient respect and zeal for the capitalist way of life.

Democratic Socialism

The candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a “democratic
socialist”, for the US presidency has produced an unprecedented barrage of
discussion in the American media about just what is this thing called
“socialism”. Most of the discussion centers around the question of government
ownership and control of the economy versus private ownership and control. This
is, of course, a very old question; the meat and potatoes of the Cold War
ideological competition.

What’s markedly different now is that a few centuries
of uninhibited free enterprise have finally laid painfully bare the basic
anti-social nature of capitalism, forcing many of even the most committed true
believers to concede the inherent harm the system brings to the lives of all
but the richest.

But regardless of what the intellects of these true
believers tell them, they still find it very difficult emotionally to
completely cut the umbilical cord to the system they were carefully raised to
place the greatest of faith in. Thus, they may finally concede that we have to
eliminate, or at least strictly minimize, the role of the profit motive in
health care and education and maybe one or two other indispensable social
needs, but they insist that the government should should keep its bureaucratic
hands off everything else; they favor as much decentralization as possible.

The most commonly proposed alternative to both
government or private control is worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned
enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Sanders has
expressed his support for worker-owned cooperatives.

There is much to be said about such systems, but the
problem I find is that they will still operate within a capitalist society,
which means competition, survival of the fittest; which means that if you can’t
sell more than your competitors, if you can’t make a sufficient net profit on
your sales, you will likely be forced to go out of business; and to prevent
such a fate, at some point you may very well be forced to do illegal or immoral
things against the public; which means back to the present.

You cannot follow the mass media without being
confronted every day with story after story of one corporation or another
trying to swindle the public in one way or another; the latest egregious case being
that of the much revered Volkswagen, recently revealed to have manipulated the
measurement of the car’s pollution emission. The fact that half of the
company’s Supervisory Board – responsible for monitoring the Management and
approving important corporate decisions – consists of employee representatives
elected by the employees did not prevent this egregious fraud; the company is
still obliged to strive to maximize profit and the firm’s stock-market value.
It’s the nature of the corporate beast within a capitalist jungle.

Only removal of the profit motive will correct such
behavior, and also keep us from drowning in a sea of advertising and my phone
ringing several times each day to sell me something I don’t need and which may
not even exist.

The market. How can we determine the proper value, the
proper price, of goods and services without “the magic of the marketplace”?
Let’s look at something most people have to pay for – rent. Who or what
designed this system where in 2015 11.8 million households in the US are paying
more than 50 percent of their income to keep a roof over their head, while rent
is considered “affordable” if it totals some 30 percent or less of one’s
income. What is the sense of this? It causes more hardship than any
other expense people are confronted with; all kinds of important needs go unmet
because of the obligation to pay a huge amount for rent each month; it is the
main cause of homelessness. Who benefits from it other than the landlords? What
is magical about that?

Above and beyond any other consideration, there is
climate change; i.e., survival of the planet, the quality of our lives. What
keeps corporations from modifying their behavior so as to be kinder to our
environment? It is of course the good old “bottom line” again. What can we do
to convince the corporations to consistently behave like good citizens? Nothing
that hasn’t already been tried and failed. Except one thing. Unmentionable in a
capitalist society. Nationalization. There, I said it. Now I’ll be getting
letters damning me as an “Old Stalinist”.

But nationalization is not a panacea either, at least
for the environment. There’s the greatest single source of environmental damage
in the world – The United States military. And it’s already been nationalized.
But doing away with private corporations will reduce the drive toward
imperialism sufficiently that before long the need for a military will fade
away and we can live like Costa Rica. If you think that would put the United
States in danger of attack, please tell me who would attack, and why.

Nationalization, hand-in-hand with a planned society,
would of course not preclude elections. On the contrary, we’d have elections
not ruled by money. What a breath of fresh air. Professor Cornel West has
suggested that it’s become difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic
society, without great concentrations of corporate power, would look like, or
how it would operate.

Who are you going to believe? Me or Dick Cheney?

I’ve spent about 30 years compiling the details of the
criminal record of US foreign policy into concise lists, and I’m always looking
for suitable occasions to present the information to new readers. The new book
by Dick Cheney and his adoring daughter is just such an occasion.

“We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable
history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known. … security and
freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s
military, economic, political, and diplomatic might.” – Dick Cheney and
Liz Cheney, “Why the world needs a powerful America”

Well … nothing short of a brain and soul transplant
would change the welt anschauung of Dr. Strangelove and his
carefully-conditioned offspring, but for all of you out there who still live in
a world of facts, logic, human rights, and human empathy, here’s the ammunition
to use if you should happen to find yourself ensnared in the embrace of the
likes of the Cheney reptiles (including mother Lynne who once set up a website
solely to attack me and seven others for holding a teach-in on September 18,
2001 in which we spoke of US foreign policy as the main provocation of what had
happened exactly a week earlier.)

Plus
… although not easily quantified … more involved in the practice of
torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not
just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the
manuals, and furnishing the equipment.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West